Category Archives: Yizkor

This is text version of remarks I made at Beth El Memorial Park at our annual Memorial Service –

The Torah reading for Yom Kippur day comes from the 16th chapter of the Book of Leviticus, and offers a description of the ancient ritual of the scapegoat that was enacted by the High Priest on Yom Kippur at the Temple in Jerusalem.The text is filled with detailed information about the ritual – what clothes the High Priest wore, precisely how the scapegoat was chosen, how the sacrifices were to be performed, how the blood from the animals was to be sprinkled on the altar.It is more textbook than text, more instruction manual than narrative.

But there is one detail in the reading that is deeply personal.It comes in the very first verse of the chapter, which reads as follows:וידבר ה׳ אל משה אחרי מות שני בני אהרון – and it was after the death of Aaron’s two sons when God spoke to Moses.There is no connection between Aaron’s terrible loss and his unspoken grief and the Yom Kippur ritual.Aaron’s loss is private, his struggle with grief is an internal struggle.But the ritual of the scapegoat is public, performed before the assembled people, and on their behalf.So I’ve often wondered why the Torah text includes that detail about the death of Aaron’s sons.

I do know that there is a temptation to carry our losses with us wherever we go.The tradition tries to discourage us from doing that.Each stage of grief is finite, marked by the counting of a set number of days.The shiva ends and the mourner is pushed out of the shiva house, asked to walk through the doorway and back out into the world.The sheloshim – the thirty day period – is counted and concluded.There is a limit placed on the recitation of the kaddish prayer, which should be recited no longer than 11 months.But the journey from loss back to life, from a broken heart to one that has become whole again, is a difficult journey.People tell me that the last day of their kaddish is highly emotional, knowing it is the last time they will stand.It is hard to let go of grief, it is hard to reenter the world after a loss.It is tempting to stay in the place and to hold on to the sadness, because in doing so, in a way, we also hold on to the people we’ve lost.

And it is in part the everyday, the simple living of life, that draws us back into the world after loss.Going back to work, meeting a friend for lunch, coming to shul, going shopping, picking up the clothes at the dry cleaners, sweeping the floor and doing the laundry, spending time with the people that we love, watching a football game, reading a book.The fabric of life.Its substance, its day to day.The sun sets and rises, the world still turns, I have a role to play, and slowly but surely I reenter that world.I carry the losses with me always, I feel the grief everyday, but in the vast world around me, in my simple busyness, in my work and my friends, in all the tasks I must take care of, it is a smaller thing, my grief, more bearable, less intensely painful.

That may be the example that Aaron the High Priest sets for us on Yom Kippur day.Still suffering from the loss of his sons, he was needed, there was work to be done, others were looking to him for help and guidance and wisdom.He might have preferred to sit alone, to ponder what had happened, to spend long hours thinking about his sons.But he was pulled away from his loss, back into the world around him with all of its tumult and responsibility.And so it often is for us as the days and weeks and months go by.As Shiva and Shelosim end, as our kaddish period comes to a close, as we immerse in the day to day and return to the world.

But there are moments when the tradition calls us back to our losses and to the profound sadness that is always just underneath the surface.When the tradition, after pushing us out of the shiva house, after ending our kaddish, reminds us of how deep the wounds are, how fresh the feelings, how profound the loss, whether we are here today honoring someone who is gone for weeks or months or years.Yizkor is one of those moments.This Memorial service is as well.When we set aside the everyday tasks, when we leave the world that is all around us with its hustle and bustle, and we visit the cemetery, and say the ancient words, and remember, once again opening our hearts fully both to the losses we’ve had, and also to the lives that we cherished and remember today.

May those memories comfort us in this season of memory, and throughout the new year that is beginning.

I’ve often wondered why the tradition is so invested in our remembering the losses of our lives. Think of it for a moment. Yartzeits are marked, and people come to services on those days to recite the kaddish. The unveiling ritual, often scheduled a full year after someone has died, brings a family back to the cemetery right about the time their grief may have been diminishing. And four times a year, on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Passover (the 8th day), and Shavuot (the 2nd day), the liturgical calendar asks us to come to services to recite Yizkor prayers.

But why the frequency and emphasis? Would we not, organically, on our own, day to day (let alone on such scheduled occasions), think of those we’ve lost? Don’t they come into our minds even without any special prayers or scheduled moments? Aren’t our losses with us every day? And if so, why all of these kaddishes? These yartzeits and Yizkors?

Perhaps one answer is that we need to be reminded that time is passing by. I have countless times over the years had the following conversation with a congregant who has come to shul to observe a yartzeit: ‘How long is your loved one gone?’ ‘Rabbi, I can’t believe it, but it is 5 years!’ Or 10, or 20, or 40. Yes, how the time goes by, and there is something important about marking its passage, about reflecting on the fact that we have bravely journeyed onward after our losses, that the sun has continued to rise and set, the moon to wax and wane, the years to pass.

There is also something to be said for connecting grief and loss and remembering to a sacred community. In that community we understand our experience is shared. We rise for Yizkor each remembering our own losses, but we rise together, surrounded by friends, supported by our fellow worshippers, comforted by a common liturgy and history. And in that moment we also honor the memories of those we’ve lost through the lens of the Tradition, so commonly an important part of their lives and the legacy they’ve left behind for us.

And also we need to carve out intentional moments in the course of our lives dedicated to remembering, reflecting, understanding, thinking, and wondering. Moments when we can feel grief, or gratitude, or often both. Moments when we can reaffirm, in a formal way, how important memory is in our lives, how deeply we feel life’s losses, and how connected we remain to the people with whom we’ve shared the journey of our lives. Even when the journey of their life has ended.

a text version of my remarks before the Yizkor service on Shemini Atzeret 5778 –

One thing rabbinical work gives you is a powerful sense of the passage of time. It is not just the holidays, how quickly they seem to come and go, how quickly one HHD season seems to blend into the next. It is also the life cycle events that you are involved with – the weddings and funerals, the baby namings and brises and b’nai mitzvah. I have discovered over the last couple of years how powerful that can be, how lucky I am to have served the congregation for a long enough period of time that I am officiating at weddings of young men and women I’ve known since even before their bar or bat mitzvah. I am now officiating at b’nai mitzvah of children whose parents I married. Let alone the fact that when I first came to Beth El, I was around the same age as the couples I was marrying, even younger than some of them. But today, when I work with couples to prepare for their wedding, I am often – surprised – to realize I am close to two decades older than the young man and woman. Time certainly does go by.

And we tend to experience that passage of time in a linear fashion. We think of time as moving in one direction, from past to present to future. But life cycle events blur that distinction. At weddings and baby naming and b’nai mitzvah past present and future seem to blend together. I’ll give you an example – a baby naming or bris is largely about the future – we give the baby a name that she or he will bear in the years ahead – we often say, ‘this is the name that the child will be called to the Torah with at their bat mitzvah,’ or ‘this is the name that will be written on their ketubah one day!’ That is all about the future!

But the truth is, a baby naming or bris is also very much about the past. We might pass the child through the generations of the family, the grandparents and great-grandparents, if the child is so lucky. We might use a kiddish cup or tallit that belonged to a grandfather or great-grandfather, evoking the family’s history. And we name after people in the family who have passed away. So in reality what happens at a baby naming or a bris or a bar or bat mitzvah, or even a wedding, is that there is a strange kind of blending of time, a moment in our present when the past and the future come together. Even the emotions that people experience at those moments are a blending the past and the future – the tears that you often see when a parent explains a baby’s Hebrew name are coming from the hope that parent feels for his or her child’s future, but at the same time those tears come from the act of remembering the past, of thinking about a grandparent or other loved one who is no longer in this world, and whose name the child will bear in the years ahead.

You may remember that a year ago or so there was a movie playing in theaters called Arrival. It told the tale of a young linguist, played by the actress Amy Adams, who is called upon to try to communicate with aliens who have landed on earth. The idea is that every species must communicate in some way, so there must be some kind of recognizable language pattern that a trained linguist can distinguish. What she ultimately learns in the course of the film is that the Aliens experience time differently than we do. They experience time more like a life cycle event – as a blending of past, present, and future. Sometimes they exist in the future, sometimes in the past, and sometimes in the present.

And in the film, as the Amy Adams character begins to understand how the aliens communicate, she also begins to experience time in the same way they do. This makes the film confusing and wonderful at the same time. Confusing because it is hard to tell, at any given point in the movie, if she is in a past, present, or future moment. But wonderful, because it asks a fundamental question – were we to know what the future holds – the pain that it will hold, even the losses that we will inevitably one day suffer – would we still move forward with our lives? Would we still marry, become parents, be devoted children and siblings, work so hard to deepen our most important relationships, knowing that one day they will be taken aways from us?

Yizkor is an answer to that question. When we rise to say the yizkor prayers we are in part saying that despite the pain we feel when we so vividly remember our losses, we would do it all over again. Even knowing what we know now – how hard it is, even after experiencing the pain of loss, the depth of sorrow, the sadness and the grief, we would begin it all over again if we could. That is one of the things we affirm when we rise for Yizkor.

And of course Yizkor also is a moment when our past, present, and future come together. The memories we recall today come to us from the depths of time, from years gone by, from experiences shared, from lives that were intertwined. That is the past. But we again experience the pain of our losses in this present moment, on this Shimini Atzeret, in this service with this congregation. And as we do we make a promise for the future – to keep the memories of those we honor today alive in our hearts and in our families in years ahead. May those memories now, then, and always be for a blessing –

This a text version of my introductory remarks to Yizkor on Shemini Atzeret 5777 –

Just a few weeks ago I was looking through some old files hoping for High Holy Day sermon inspiration when I cam across a text I at first did not recognize. It was 16 pages long, in a larger font, and when I began to read through it I realized what it was – a text of the last Yizkor sermon Rabbi Mark Loeb ever gave. Some of you may remember the occasion – it was on YK afternoon, 9 years ago, and it was the first time we had combined our afternoon yizkor services. We had advertised that Rabbi Loeb would be giving that afternoon’s sermon, hoping to draw a large crowd, and we were not disappointed. The Berman Rubin Sanctuary was packed, standing room only, with more than 1500 people who had come not only to recite their yizkor prayers on our tradition’s most sacred day, but also to hear their beloved Rabbi give perhaps his last major sermon.

As you may expect, Rabbi Loeb did not disappoint. I remember the powerful emotion in the room that afternoon, but to be honest I did not remember much of what Rabbi Loeb said, which simply proves my experience that most sermons are not remembered. I knew he had approached the talk as a ‘last lecture’ – an idea that comes from the world of academia, where a retiring professor will give a final talk in which he hopes to summarize his life’s work. And he had listed out a number of specific points about Judaism and Jewish life that he felt were the keys to finding meaning in our tradition. And I also remember he had concluded the sermon with a classic Hasidic tale, the point of which is to be true to yourself.

I have a feeling the text of his sermon fell into my hands that very day, בעצם היום הזה the tradition would say, when he left it on the pulpit he had so powerfully graced for more than 30 years. He was not one for saving sermons, and when he did take them he casually tossed them into the trash can in his office after services. But that day I saw the text lying there, took it, and slipped it into my own files, thinking that one day it would be insightful, a historical artifact for the congregation, a testament to Rabbi Loeb’s thinking and teaching.

Since I have rediscovered it, I have read through the text a number of times during this holiday season. It is almost as if Rabbi Loeb’s booming voice is coming back across the void, his be-robed figure swaying slightly as he leaned into the words of his message, his organized mind and elegant tongue laying out his sense of what it means to be Jew. What was most striking to me about his remarks as I read and reread them was how often he spoke of love. His love of Baltimore, his adopted home town, and most importantly his love of Beth El, our community and our congregants. And of course his deep love of the tradition he had served and wrestled with for all those long years.

When things settle down after the holidays I will have the entire text of Rabbi Loeb’s sermon published on our FB page. But today, as we come together near the conclusion of our holiday season, as we gather to recite our yizkor prayers, 9 years after Rabbi Loeb spoke those words from this pulpit, and just a few days after we marked his 7th yartzeit, there is one section of his text I would like to share with you. This is the 7th of the 12 messages of Judaism that he spoke about that day, and I am quoting directly:

“I love Judaism because it has taught the world the idea of a covenantal love relationship between God and humankind, the ideal expression of a love that at times may falter but will never end. Such a paradigm of love is meant to inform our view of the sanctity of human relationships, reminding us that it is our religious duty to try never to give up on one another, whether it be our children, our brothers, our sisters, our husbands, our wives, our parents or our friends. We must never treat each other as objects, but, as Martin Buber taught, as sacred others. Things are replaceable but people, even those we find difficult to abide at a given moment, are not.”

And it seems to me those few words capture the idea of what yizkor is all about. First that we have not given up, that through the pain of loss, through grief, through guilt and sadness, and whatever other emotions we struggle with today, we have not given up. And secondly, that the people we stand to say yizkor for today can never be replaced. Their presence continues to be a part of our lives, their values and morals guideposts to our characters, to how we live and who we are. It is a brave thing to stand to say yizkor – to once again stare into the face of loss, knowing that our grief will feel fresh and raw, but determined to fulfill our obligations and to do our very best to move forward, carrying our losses while at the very same time living our lives with a renewed sense of gratitude and faith.

Towards the end of Rabbi Loeb’s remarks on that day he said this, and again I quote directly: “I would never have had the opportunities and experiences that have enriched my life so much if it hadn’t been for you… and as my service to Beth El comes to a close this spring, (I know) that a part of you will always live in me. I hope the converse is true.”

As we rise together to say our yizkor prayers we acknowledge how very true that statement is, for our friends, our family members, for all those we call to mind today – may their memories always be for a blessing –

This a text version of yesterday’s introduction to Yizkor (Shavuot 5776) –

Judaism has long understood that one essential component of coping with loss is community. From the very moment that a family loses a loved one community is there. Friends begin to gather at the home, to offer comfort, guidance, and help. The funeral is a communal moment structured to honor and remember the life of the person who has died. Shiva is a paradigmatic communal exercise – at least 10 people are required for each service held in the shiva home, the days of shiva are filled with visits by friends and family members, the mourners are guided from one conversation to the next, from one moment to the next, always surrounded by people who care about them.

And then there is the period of saying the kaddish, for some 30 days, for others who have lost a parent a full eleven months. The minyan is again required because the kaddish is only fully valid when said in the presence of community. The services, morning and night, bring the mourner out of the home, into the synagogue, into the service with its sense of communal life and connection. I have watched many times as mourners have connected with our minyan, making new friends, finding a sense of purpose and resolve, finding in the community a reason to get out of bed and begin a new day. People are waiting here for you, they call when you don’t come, they care, they understand where you are and how you feel, because they’ve been there and they’ve felt those things, and they somehow made it through. And they will tell you that the community helped them do it.

We saw this in Orlando yesterday, that terrible, unimaginable, unthinkable tragedy that we will long wrestle with as a nation. Immediately community came together. People set aside political divides and racial differences and religious perspectives, and came together as one, came together as community to support and console the families of the victims and also one another. There was a powerful sense of fundamental humanity – it didn’t matter if people were black or white, gay or straight, young or old, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, conservative or liberal. There is a powerful picture on the front page of the Sun this morning, a black clergyman embracing a white man and a white woman, the three of them weeping together.

In community there is hope. In community there is healing. In community there is a sharing of difficult burdens, a sense that one does not have to walk alone on a path of sadness and loss, and perhaps sometimes even despair. Not that there is a magic formula, not that there is a secret ritual that will wipe the grief away. But there are people who will share the journey with you, and you are not alone.

The people in Orlando are not alone. They are surrounded by the thoughts and prayers of an entire nation, 300 million strong, a nation that believes in equality, in peace and freedom, and in the common human dignity that unites us all. In the months ahead they will come to see how this powerful sense of communal caring and sharing helped to ease the burden of their grief. They will gradually rediscover how beautiful it is when the wind blows gently through the leaves of a tree on a warm summer day. They will one day realize that they have begun to laugh again, to sometimes feel joy, to emerge from the darkness and the shadows to go back out into the world with purpose and courage and hope. This is the journey from loss to life, from sadness to meaning, from darkness to light, and it is a life long journey.

In Judaism part of that journey is Yizkor. A stopping point along the way that brings you back to community, to tradition, to the shul, to the minyan, that reminds you of the pain of loss but also, as time goes by, of the sacred power of life. As we rise together for this last Yizkor service of the year, as we prepare to say our personal Yizkor prayers, we also pray for hope and healing and peace, in our own hearts, in our lives, in our communities, and in the world.